Harding is looking to apply the process in a variety of industries and products, but because it can cut very hard and rare materials, the first major application area may be the aerospace and medical markets or very hard materials. Production of tools. Thomason said: "The process is not available in certain industries."
Thomason and Sheehy declined to talk about the cost of installing and using the process, but they said the cost was different for different applications. In addition, Thomason said the expected return on investment for the process will vary from application to application. â€
He said: "Just because of improved tool life and increased wear resistance of the blade, the process is likely to achieve huge compensation immediately." Sheehy added that Harding has found that the process has shortened the time to rough grinding parts from 4 hours. In 15 minutes, the roughing time was almost reduced by 95%. In addition, he said that the tolerances of the parts coming out of the car are the same as those of the rough grinding. Finally, he said that in the workpiece, the IceFIy process uses inexpensive ceramic blades instead of CBN tools.
Sheehy said that “the cost of using liquid nitrogen has increased, but this increase has been completely offset by the reduction in cycle time and the reduction in tool costs.â€
Ghosh said Air Products holds or has adopted nine major patents for the IceFIy process, and these patents cover both the process and the equipment developed by the company for the process. Thomason said that for hard-vehicle applications, the process is now available on the market.
Ghosh said. He believes that liquid nitrogen processes can be developed for other processes such as milling, but to achieve this, some development work is required.
Advantages • The rough cutting time of hard materials has been reduced to 1/16 of the previous one.
· Improved surface hardness, wear resistance and fatigue strength.
· Tool costs are reduced by 85%.
Aspects that need to be weighed:
· Costs need to be incurred to retrofit machine tools.
· The processing cost per part increases.
· Return on investment varies by application.
· (Current) is only suitable for turning operations.
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